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One Computer to Rule Them All
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has published a research paper describing an initiative called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building "a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application." Nicholas Carr describes the paper with the words "Forget Thomas Watson's apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one." Here is the original paper."
Not gonna happen. One computer - one organization as the power. Does all corporations use gmail? No. The ssame with OSCPW (One Super Computer Per World).
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Putting all of your eggs in one basket always seemed like a good idea...
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Having a worldwide master computer really worked for the Bynars. I'm sure it'll work here on Earth too.
Huh? The Internet is not an application. It's just a big network. Sounds like marketing speak to me.
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of Internets! Bah.
Now that old standard user complaint might actually become true!
Maybe Asimov was right after all?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
...they are going to patent the Storm Worm computer virus.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
plus a hot spare, off-site.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. To my astonishment and distress he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D20616C6C2C204F6E65204F5320746F 2066696E64207468656D2C0D0A4F6E65204F5320746F206272696E67207468656D20 616C6C20616E6420696E20746865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D
'I cannot read the fiery letters,' I said.
'No,' he said, 'but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
And just for that very same reason, i suggest we implement a kill switch ..
a kill switch like..hmm..how about : whatcouldpossiblegowrong ??
agreed then. Thank you for participating.
In real life there may be a case to be made for IBM's solution. But making that case has more to do with actually convincing large customers that IBM is substantially cheaper (and runs the software people need). Since that doesn't seem to be happening on a massive scale, I tend to doubt IBM's hype.
Can the entropy of the universe be reversed? will be the question we will be asking this computer.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wouldn't the Terminator series be more on topic than The Matrix?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
... Well, I don't have the creativity to write something this nice, and certainly I don't have the right to spoil it. Check out one of the most enjoyable short stories written by Aasimov
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm glad they're forward-looking enough to implement Phython, the best of PHP and Python in one language. Maybe next year they can implement Pherlthon?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The internet was invented as a military network to survive even the loss of one land. Dumb, if the only internet server is in exactly this land. Redundancy is absolutley wanted, to support the internet to stay alive.
I can't wait to be submit my credit card, using my e-banking or book airline tickets, to a bunch of random desktop machines hosting a distributed web application.
I'm using edge cases? I'm being biased? Well, here's how IBM describes their project: "Such a computer would be capable of hosting not only individual web-scale workloads but the entire Internet."
The *entire* Internet is vastly more complex and demanding on its *backend* than its *frontend* reveals. What can be hosted entirely on a distributed network of desktop machines precludes many trusted and secure online transactions we make use of in the Internet today. It's obvious from the get go, that this will be only usable for a limited subset of online applications (like, hosting Wikipedia for ex.?) , but I guess making overly broad statements caught the eye of some bloggers and journalists.
...TFA gives it as http://weather.ou.edu/~apw/projects/kittyhawk/kittyhawk.pdf
-- Free speech is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Kind of. It is registered in the tax roles, it just can't be accounted for once it is dispersed: "The Department of Defense... once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions..." according to a Government Accountability office "A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn't properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent." -sfgate
Maybe they are building that giant-mega-super-computer after all, or maybe they are funding covert wars and skimming your money for $640 toilet seats and retirement funds. Either way, they are outright taking money from me with no accountability which makes me even more pissed than if it were secret!
Get a web developer
In the eighties I read a short story where they built a massive computer to answer the question 'is there a god'.
They turned it on, and got the answer 'there is now'.
Fiction yes, but it was musing on the problem of relience on a single solution to a big problem (being in that case a question, but implying a deeper relience on computers, such that this solution was conceived in the first place). What if the single solution fails, or doesn't do what you want?
I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked.
It'll store all the internet?
Wonderful. Then, just like my computer, I estimate the data it contains to be about 70% porn.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
What happens when they put it on the Internet, and then has to also serve itself?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
...and can we call it MCP, please? :-)
"Answer" by Fredric Brown, I would assume...
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2112_(song)
We've taken care of everything
The words you hear, the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes
It's one for all and all for one
We work together, common sons
Never need to wonder how or why
We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls
Although the logo of SYRINX is "red, not blue"
I did read the article. IBM is talking about running it on a Blue Gene type of machine.
The Blue Gene is sort of a cluster in a box but it isn't what your talking about.
Maybe they think a cluster of Blue Gene's might be what they are thinking of.
I doubt that they are planing replacing the Internet with one machine but a Blue Gene might replace Google's cluster. It might even be cheaper, faster, user less power, and be easier to manage. IBM has decades of experience making systems that have up times of years so being a single point of failure is less of an issue than many people might think.
I have to find the idea of a Blue Gene running LAMP is very very odd but hey IBM did it.
The headline is catchy but the real meat of the story is that IBM thinks that Blue Gene could replace a data center full of 1U servers. So no not the internet hosted on one machine but EBay, Goggle, or Yahoo hosted on one machine.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Considering that the Internet's very definition is (in theory) a "network that is resistant to point attacks by virtue of being decentralized", sure, let's move back to the central server architecture. That is progress.
Also, this is wonderful because it means we only need to protect a single computer from being monitored by the various US agencies. Oh wait...
"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket. See also KISS Principle, elegant.
I'd say that IBM knows how to build a pretty reliable basket..
http://catb.org/jargon/html/A/airplane-rule.html
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Forbin: "The computer center contains over one-hundred thousand remote sensors and communication devices which monitor all electronic transmissions, such as microwave, laser, radio and television communications, data communications from satellites in orbit all over the world. ... Colossus works completely without human aid. We make no secret of where Colossus is located nor do we intend to conceal how it functions. ... Colossus does have its own defense. It is its own defense. In case of an attack on any of its information supply or power lines Colossus will switch on energy circuits, which will then take their appropriate action. It is self-sufficient, self-protecting, self-generating. It is impenetrable. In short there's no way in. No human being can touch it. ... Colossus can communicate with us ... and through this machine we can, in turn, communicate with Colossus. Now there's one last point. One inevitable question. That we have been asked very frequently before. And that is, is Colossus capable of creative thought? Can it initiate new thought? I can tell you that the answer to that is no. However, Colossus is a paragon of knowledge and its knowledge can be expanded upon indefinitely. I hope, along with all the scientists who helped make this particular project, that the immense power of this computer will not only be for the defense of this country but hopefully also act as an aid to the solution to the many problems that we face on this earth. And the many more problems that we will face the more deeply we penetrate into the universe. Thank you."
Almost immediately after the broadcast ends, Colossus displays a cryptic warning: "There is another system".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That reminds me, what ever happened to the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag for this story?
"It began to learn at a geometric rate"
"It decided our fate in a microsecond"
Do we really need to pattern our world after sci-fi. If so, then lets do something fun like give everybody phasers and transporters. Not supercomputers connected to everything, that will learn and eventually figure out for themselves that humans are a virus and need to be exterminated.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain